I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.

Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.

At Chicago I offer a course on Emotion, Reason and the Law that law students just love. But I am not there as a lawyer, my job is to teach philosophy.

All of us, whether we are ignorant of philosophy or professors of philosophy, find it easier to follow dogma than to think.

Seeing death is not as difficult as you might think. What's harder is to see people suffer. It's the people the dead left behind that get to you.

One must keep working continuously; otherwise, one thinks of death.

If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.

I have a store full of thousands and thousands of images in my brain. I've got this terrible feeling I'm like some abattoir boss: I know death; I know the cut pieces of the human body.